The invention relates generally to fuel dispensers and, more particularly, to fuel dispensers and dispensing systems providing interactive, multimedia functions to a customer. In recent years, fuel dispensers have become more than a means for fueling a vehicle. Service station owners are advertising at the dispenser with everything from simple signs to video displays running commercials. Some service stations have integrated fast-food or quick-serve restaurants, and the dispensers have been converted into complex point-of-sale (POS) systems for ordering food from these restaurants. Additionally, the POS systems facilitate ordering other services, such as car washes, at the gas station. Most modern fuel dispensers include card readers or other payment means allowing payment for not only fuel, but also any products or services ordered at the dispenser.
As the amount of information and number of products and services provided to the consumer increases, dispenser suppliers need economical ways to provide information to the customer and market the fuel company's primary products and services. As the amount of information and number of products and services increase, the number of ways to present such information to the customer increases exponentially. Each oil company and station operator wants to provide information and merchandise to their customers in different ways. Until applicants' invention, these companies and station operators were significantly limited in providing information and marketing goods and services at the dispenser.
A typical fuel dispensing system includes a plurality of fuel dispensers with two fueling positions per dispenser and a central site controller. Sophisticated dispenser systems incorporate expensive, hardware-intensive controllers in each dispenser. Many fueling positions may include a display and touch pad (or screen) to order goods or services. Until now, customer interactivity was limited to choosing an option presented by the dispenser. Unfortunately, changing the various options or presentations for the customer involved changing firmware or downloading new software to each dispenser. With any software application, revisions are necessary and when revisions are made, every dispenser at every desired location must be upgraded.
Although the information age is upon us, modern fuel dispensers have been unable to take full advantage of the tremendous merchandising opportunity presented when a customer is fueling a vehicle. Likewise, customers cannot access useful information during this period. Modern dispensers are unable to provide national advertising and merchandising campaigns or offer information a traveler may want or need during fueling. For example, customers cannot purchase products or services outside the realm of the local station store, such as concert or movie tickets. Valuable information, such as news, weather, traffic updates or customized road maps, is unavailable. Although modern dispensers are highly sophisticated, the cost of providing customized local and remote merchandising, as well as information dissemination, has not been economical.
Prior dispenser technology provided little, if any, integration between advertising and merchandising at the POS. Even in today's most sophisticated systems, advertising is sent to the fuel dispenser from a separate source and often displayed on a separate display than the POS. See Gilbarco's U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,602,745 for Fuel Dispenser Electronics Design, 5,543,849 for Synchronization of Prerecorded Audio/Video Signals with Multimedia Controllers, and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/659,304, filed Jun. 6, 1996. Each reference is incorporated herein by reference. The POS simply functions to display order options to the customer, and the customer responds accordingly. The current trend is to increase the computational ability within each dispenser when additional functionality is needed. Although current dispensers are highly sophisticated, the cost to provide each fueling position on each fuel dispenser with the computational horsepower to fully realize multimedia applications outweighed the benefits, and providing customized software for the thousands of stations throughout the world would be very expensive.
Thus, there is a need to provide an economically viable dispenser architecture capable of providing multimedia functions, such as order entry, advertising, merchandising and information dissemination. There is a need for a user-friendly graphical user interface through which a customer can interact to access these functions or services. Furthermore, there is a need, not only for local merchandising and information dissemination, but for remote merchandising and information dissemination from sources that are not directly related to the main service station store to take full advantage of the merchandising potential at the dispenser. There is also a need for an interactive fuel dispenser capable of providing a customer the opportunity to order foods, products and services from the local station store in addition to purchasing products or services, such as movie tickets, or downloading information such as news, weather, traffic updates or road maps from local or remote sites.